Falling damage is just the Earth making an attack against your character

In dwarf fort there was a bug where people would parry the impact and reach levels in skills that were impossible. they'd go from level 3 to 40 instantly in a game where the max is 20
absolute death machines afterward because of this

>missing an obvious Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reference.

>Rogue falls from low orbit
>Activates Bloody Path just before hitting the ground
>Planet somehow slams into itself causing a cataclysmic earthquake

I thought flying was throwing yourself at the ground and missing.

I thought flying was falling with style

Wait, what
This isn't real, is it?
Who thought this made sense?

but that is totally how it works in hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

the people who designed wizards

Its one of the best reasons people ever had for giving 4th edition shit. Everyone gets neat combat powers on cooldowns, and those powers largely don't make any fucking sense.

Bards, for example, can distract an inanimate object so hard that it will spontaneously break.

You're shitting me, what is that called?

"Distract", I think.
Its just a generic low level damage dealing power available to bards that is fluffed as distracting the enemy so hard they take damage, but without any actual restrictions on what you can use it on because that would make it worse than the generic low level damage powers available to the other classes.

If everyone gets a damage power, and they all do the same amount of damage but against different defense scores, its balanced. But they are different powers, because they have different names and different fluff.
Not all of those fluff explanations make sense.

That sounds depressingly uniform.

Here's the "I insult him so hard he takes damage" power. While different from the distraction power, it's still ridiculous.

That's a spell though.

You can find it in 5e.

youtube.com/watch?v=4fAo7yxAC9c

>missing an obvious Loony Toons reference

>Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reference

Sorry, I'm not in middleschool anymore.

The earth only attacks you because it sees you as an enemy. It might take a lot of work, but you could somehow convince it that you're friends, and then no more falling damage.

Are you implying that you forgot everything you read in middle school? I mean I can understand not remembering every single book. But Hitchhiker's is a pretty fucking good book. And the flight part is one of the more common references.

Wizards who focus on earth elemental magic can absorb earth elemental magic, right? So essentially you can heal yourself by falling

The beginning of that strip sounds like Discworld.

One day at work I reworked falling damage for 5e because I didn't like that a human falling from a very tall height was instant death to commoners (when people have fallen out of airplanes and survived), falling from a short height always meant damage (when people jump off of roofs and shit and don't always get hurt), and it stopped escalating at 200 ft. (which is not even close to terminal velocity).

Judo: The art of using a fucking PLANET as a weapon

And that doesn't affect inanimate objects.

It's an intentional oversimplification used by 3eaboos to discredit 4e. The classes' powers are all designed to reinforce their roles. 3eaboos cherrypick the few that don't make perfect sense and say they're emblematic of every single power in the game. And when I say "the few", I basically mean "Bloody Path, end of list."

Most people who fell out of a plane only survived because they fell onto earth that was soft enough to cushion their fall.

Even then, they rarely walked away from it unscathed.

There have also been cases where people jumped from a 10 ft. drop and broke bones because they landed incorrectly. Think about how many people trip and fall down the stairs and suffer injuries for example.

Not to mention, even if it's not terminal velocity per se, 200 ft. is a good place to start because honestly, if you're falling off a 200+ ft. cliff, y'kinda deserve to die.

In Dwarf Fortress, that is exactly how falling damage works. The floor material attacks your character with a velocity modifier dependent on how far you've fallen.

Because the game is written to use the same mechanics through every interaction, and because this special case was not originally accounted for, and as it was in fact an 'attack,'
yes,
Dwarves could parry the world to prevent falling damage.
But more than that, due to some quirk of the system, a dwarf that parried the world would instantly achieve martial enlightenment, becoming a master of their art and a veritably perfect physical specimen.

would that not also destroy their weapon, their arm, and the dwarf?

I am under the impression falling damage is near instantly lethal from my very old adventure tests.

You must learn how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day and try it. The first part is easy. All it requires is the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt. That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. If you are really trying properly, the likelyhood is that you will fail to miss the ground fairly hard.

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

It is notoriously difficult to prise your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people's failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.

If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination), or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above the ground in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner.

I understand, but the 1d6 per 10 ft., stop at 20d6, doesn't allow for outliers like that. I wanted something more realistic. I know it's fantasy, but that doesn't mean commoners, gravity and the dirt are fantastic.

Parrying an attack negates it entirely.
They simply landed gently
on their face.

Though now that the possibility has been removed now, and with the recent changes to combat, weapon material behavior, and force physics, long falls can be fucking messy indeed.

Does the spear of enlightenment still work?

No, and Danger Rooms aren't really more effective than sparring now.
Though, showering dwarves in seeds and coins does increase their armor skill.

D&D isn't meant to be realistic, it's supposed to give you a system that allows you to take a party through a dungeon, get phat stacks, fuck bitches, and kill powerful monsters.

For all we know, shit like commoners, gravity, and dirt are fantastic and work much differently than how they would work IRL.

Not to mention, some people might have a problem with your homebrew, especially if it causes them a disadvantage and it's largely untested. Unless it's so basic that it practically changes nothing, you're going to end up pissing people off in the long run.

aaaand now I'm rereading these

>Though, showering dwarves in seeds and coins does increase their armor skill.
How does that even work?

>fuck bitches
where's that in the book?

The part where it lists treasure, which you then sell for money, which you then use to hire whores, which you then proceed to fuck.

God, it's not rocket science user.

user, I don't even play the game, I just come here to talk about it with fa/tg/uys.

And there's only two instances someone would know I wasn't using RAW, anyways, and that's a.) when I tell them they take 0 damage (I don't think DMs should tell players what monsters take for damage, so they'd never know if an enemy wasn't hurt by a fall) or b.) when they metagame and think, "I can't take more than 120 points of damage and I have 121 HP, so I'll just jump into this gaping maw," and then they die and learn a valuable lesson about ttrpgs.

I suspect it's something like The Elder Scrolls game where you level your armor skill just by letting enemies wail on you.

If seeds and coins are considered by the game engine to be projectiles in the same manner as arrows and sling bullets, then dumping a sack of gold pieces out on someone's head would count as having them get hit by hundreds of "attacks", thus leveling their armor skill quickly.

This is just a guess; I don't know much about the game.

Down this way lies Iron Heart Surge levels of madness.

>'I can end the source of one condition currently affecting me. This blizzard is making me cold. I will the blizzard out of existence.'

No, that's gliding with a spacesuit.

If you have high CON or DEF, sure.

If you have high enough DEX, you can throw yourself towards the ground, and dodge your way to functional, low altitude flight, or at least gliding.

Oh, I know that. I meant it as "how do I shower dwarves with coins"
Like, do I make a minecart railgun? I think it'd be too lethal but it's the only thing I can think of.

The outliers were the landing material and having their falls broken. The actual amount of people who have survived a 200 foot fall is less than 1% of people.

Honestly, if someone falls from 200 feet, just roll d% and they survive on a 01. You don't need to mechanize it.

I know you don't play, but to help your future arguments here
a: Most good DMs won't tell the players the actual damage they took, but tend to go out of their way to helpfully suggest their blow wasn't as effective to give them feedback. Usually in the form of "tink. Nothing happens"

b: Unless you're playing Unknown Armies, a PC will on average have at least a general knowledge of how much stress/damage they can take. RPG characters are just excessively good at tracking it.

Saving against the Earth

>Strength based
You fist the earth with force equal to the fall. The resulting shock sends tremors all around.

>Dexterity based
You dodge at the last moment, flinging yourself parallel with the ground. As you whiz past, you extend your legs and take off running.

>Constitution based
You tank the fall with your face. There is now a permanent face-shaped crater in the ground.

>Intelligence based
You calculate the exact vector you need to hit in order to harmlessly tumble away, several hundred feet.

>Wisdom based
You understand that you and the Earth are one, and are absorbed into the ground upon impact. Two days later, you re-materialize.

>Charisma based
You sweet-talk the Earth before impact. Because the Earth no longer sees you as an enemy, she declines to attack you as you impact. You *pomf* harmlessly onto the ground then fuck a nearby gopher-hole.

>Wisdom based
Jesus didn't reincarnate after 3 days, he just fell down.